Nguyen Du was a Vietnamese official displaced in a dynastic shift and sent into provincial exile in the service of his new overlord. The epic poem Kim Van Kieu was his most notable work during this period. The saga of wanderings and travail is seen as a lament of the overthrow of the ruling house of his youth and the loss of his former state.
Nguyen Du was a Vietnamese official displaced in a dynastic shift and sent into provincial exile in the service of his new overlord. The epic poem Kim...
"In my mind rose a misty picture of a little girl in a floral dress. As for her face: nothing. I could only hope that she had been pretty. I sat overcome. What a procession of developments in one day Only that morning I had left Madiun; at midday I was wobbling on a buggy past an ocean of rice fields; tonight, suddenly, I had been renamed by my parents and handed a wife."
Thus begins Sastrodarsono's life, returning to his village as a newly- appointed schoolteacher, and by virtue of that position, a member of the "priyayi" - functionary gentry awesomely elevated above the peasantry of...
"In my mind rose a misty picture of a little girl in a floral dress. As for her face: nothing. I could only hope that she had been pretty. I sat overc...
The "Kim Van Kieu" of Nguyen Du, written in the early nineteenth century and commonly considered to be a defining masterpiece of Vietnamese literature, is the story of an educated and beautiful young woman who suffers misfortune and degradation before obtaining justice and peace. It is a long poem in a complex metric and rhyme scheme that is distinctively Vietnamese. Vladislav Zhukov here provides the first English-language translation, perfectly conveying the poetic form of the original work and thereby producing a literary creation in English that is equivalent to Nguyen Du's genius in...
The "Kim Van Kieu" of Nguyen Du, written in the early nineteenth century and commonly considered to be a defining masterpiece of Vietnamese literat...
The "Kim Van Kieu" of Nguyen Du, written in the early nineteenth century and commonly considered to be a defining masterpiece of Vietnamese literature, is the story of an educated and beautiful young woman who suffers misfortune and degradation before obtaining justice and peace. It is a long poem in a complex metric and rhyme scheme that is distinctively Vietnamese. Vladislav Zhukov here provides the first English-language translation, perfectly conveying the poetic form of the original work and thereby producing a literary creation in English that is equivalent to Nguyen Du's genius in...
The "Kim Van Kieu" of Nguyen Du, written in the early nineteenth century and commonly considered to be a defining masterpiece of Vietnamese literat...
The two volumes consist of 38 short stories and travel sketches describing Russians and parts of the Soviet Union which up to Kazakov's time (he died in 1982) had been almost untouched by that country's 20th century upheavals. The majority of his settings are the coast and forests adjoining the White Sea, peopled by hunters, fishermen, buoy-keepers, ancient peasants, children in the most halcyon moment of their youth, and among his memorable actors are not excluded even an occasional soul-full dog or bear. Through the eyes of this new array of 'Russian originals' we return to forgotten ways...
The two volumes consist of 38 short stories and travel sketches describing Russians and parts of the Soviet Union which up to Kazakov's time (he died ...
In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His pristine settings are once again living presences described with the touch of a 'psychologist of nature', to quote one of his admirers, the poet Andrei Voznesensky. This was a region whose inhabitants as late as the second half of the 20th century were still largely unaffected by the complexities of modernity, folk for whom the great world was the primordial one of their surroundings: an immediately-sensed universe extending from the near, and at first glance ordinary,...
In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His pristine settings are once aga...
From their origin in paddy mud during the final decades of the Dutch East Indies, to unimagined roles within the new structures of a modernising Indonesia, 'Gentry' is the saga of an extended Javanese family heroically pursuing its dream of betterment through a social leap. There was in that era at the start of this story a unique route by which an exceptionally determined peasant might attain the status of a 'priyayi'--a class of functionary gentry with a government salary, bureaucratic aristocrats with duties divorced from manual labour, bearers of noble principles of responsibility,...
From their origin in paddy mud during the final decades of the Dutch East Indies, to unimagined roles within the new structures of a modernising Indon...
The setting for his collection of eighteen stories by Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was the Adriatic seaport of Pescara and its hinterland in the Italian region of Abruzzo, the author depicting events and personalities from the time of his youth, but also drawing from bygone incidents that were yet memorable in the area's folk history. Pescara may not have had the cachet of celebrated cities such as Venice or Florence, but sympathetically and wryly revealed here by the pen of one of Italy's great writers it lives and breathes with a vitality probably best compared to that of James Joyce's...
The setting for his collection of eighteen stories by Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was the Adriatic seaport of Pescara and its hinterland in the It...
